American Egyptologist

by Jeffrey Abt (Chicago)

Born in Illinois in 1865, James Henry Breasted turned an early interest in the ministry and a talent for languages into a remarkable career as America’s first formally trained Egyptologist. He specialized in the recording of inscriptions and wanted nothing less than “the recopying and republication of all of Egypt.” Abt’s absorbing and sumptuously illustrated book places Breasted’s life in the broader contexts of a codifying educational system, philanthropy in the Gilded Age, and the growing chasm between faith and reason. Indeed, Breasted argued that the origins of modern moral thought could be traced to ancient Egypt, and wrote, “For the first time our world, if not the universe, is historically demonstrated to possess a value and a meaning.” ♦

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